It was a year brimful of new writing and young talent. Jez Butterworth's gorgeous Jerusalem – a play for a new Glastonbury generation – was given a superb production by Ian Rickson, with Mark Rylance, that most chameleon of actors, towering as a lord of misrule. In Enron, Lucy Prebble produced one of the most incisive political dramas of the decade. Rupert Goold directed it with dazzle, like a hi-tech danse macabre; among raptor puppets and neon, Samuel West turned memorably from smoothie chops to shambles.

Both productions, bound for the West End, were staged at the Royal Court (although Enron was first seen at buoyant Chichester). That was symptomatic. Dominic Cooke's theatre flew sky-high on the wings of new plays. The constantly reconfigured stage upstairs was ignited by Mike Bartlett's Cock, Alia Bano's Shades and by Polly Stenham's sharp-toothed Tusk Tusk which was performed by a startlingly youthful cast – for most of the evening, no one on stage was over 18.

In fact, 2009 was a year in which a new generation of gifted actors declared itself. Simon Stephens's Punk Rock – Sean Holmes's first show as artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith – featured the outstanding Tom Sturridge as a schoolboy slowly rumpling into murderous madness. At the Young Vic, Che Walker and Arthur Darvill's Been So Long was galvanised by the tremendous Naana Agyei-Ampadu. In the National's Phèdre, Ruth Negga glowed – she seemed scarcely to perform but simply to transmit. Also at the National, Michelle Terry morphed wonderfully through multiple guises in Richard Bean's exhilarating England People Very Nice, which parodied prejudice in strip-cartoon style and got people's danders up.

In this year of striking dialogue (lots of that in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art), site-specific work was less evident. Nevertheless, Punchdrunk took over a tunnel in Waterloo, and in Manchester combined with Damon Albarn and Adam Curtis; for Cardboard Citizens' Mincemeat, Mamoru Iriguchi brilliantly remade the Shoreditch Cordy House into a bomb site, a refuge and the chilliest of morgues.

The West of England became an essential theatrical destination. Bristol Old Vic was galvanised by Andrew Hilton's angry Tobacco Factory production of Uncle Vanya, while the Drum in Plymouth was shaken to the rafters by Carl Grose's Grand Guignol. In Liverpool, Roger McGough's The Hypochondriac was most efficacious in every way.